Kill the King by Sandrone Dazieri

Author:Sandrone Dazieri [Dazieri, Sandrone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501174742
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

4

After they had finished their tea, Luca had insisted on ordering cups of hot chocolate for them all, again over the walkie-talkie, in spite of his father’s feeble attempt to protest that he’d already brought them tea and cookies. “It’s an exceptional occasion,” Luca had retorted, remaining stubbornly entrenched in his demands.

“So, you communicated by banging on the walls of the shipping containers?” Colomba asked as she blew on her cup of piping hot chocolate.

“That’s right,” Luca replied, stirring the sugar into his. He was careful not to touch the sides of the cup with his spoon.

“It was like Morse code. In a way. When I got home, I checked it against the official Morse code. It’s different.”

“Do you remember it?”

“Yes.”

The boy got a sheet of paper and wrote:

A .

B ._

C ..

D ._ _

E ._.

F .._

G ...

H ._ _ _

I ._ _.

J ._._

K ._ ._

L .._ _

M .._ .

N ..._

O ....

P ._ _ _ _

Q ._ _ _ .

R ._ _._

S ._ _ ..

T ._ . _ _

U ._ ._ .

V ._.._

W ._ ...

X .. _ _ _

Y .._ _ .

Z .._._

Colomba took a moment to check on her cell phone, and sure enough, it was the way Luca had said: Morse code was similar, but radically different. “Are you sure that you’re remembering correctly?” she asked.

Luca nodded. “The dots were a tap, or a bang, and the dashes were a scratch.” He offered a practical demonstration on the desk, using his fingernails. “It wasn’t easy, but the boy on my right was really fast.”

Colomba thought back to the location of the specific prisoners in the shipping containers: the one to Luca’s right had slashed his wrists after being rescued; he’d been a prisoner for five years.

“How did you learn it?” Esposito asked.

“There were some words written on the ceiling of my shipping container. I could only see it when the sun shone through the air grate,” said Luca. “It was written in poop. But it didn’t smell bad anymore.”

My God, Colomba thought. How can you force a child to experience anything of the sort? “What was written?” she made herself ask.

“It said to memorize it and then erase it. Which is what I did.” A pause and then: “But I’m not sure exactly what the others were talking about. I just passed the messages on, and they were always too fast for me to be able to understand them.”

“What do you mean by ‘passing messages on’?” Esposito asked, his mouth dry.

Luca sketched figures out in the air. “There were ten of us. If you were at the beginning of the line and you wanted to talk to the last one in the line, then the people in the middle had to pass on the messages. Like in a game of telephone.”

“How did you know who the messages were for?”

“We each had a code name,” said Luca. “Mine was …” He tapped and scratched it out on the desktop. Tap. Tap. Tap. Scratch. Pause. Tap. Scratch. Scratch. Colomba tried to decipher it, but she couldn’t.

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